I have just begun looking into medical research and what you say is very true. I have been trying to compile that information for a presentation and have been having a difficult time of it. Some of it is "buried" very, very, deep. And not having the ability to read "Chinese", I am at some what a disadvantage on this subject as so much more has been done in China.

If any of you have a list, or links pertaining to sound medical studys, I would be very much in your debt.

The most exhaustive bibliographies I've seen are in Douglas Wile's _Lost T'ai-chi Classics from the Late Ch'ing Dynasty_, and his later book, _T'ai Chi's Ancestors_. Both are particularly strong for their listings of Chinese books and wushu periodical articles. If you don't have either of these, maybe I could fax photocopies of the bibs to you?

By the way if you haven't done so, try entering Chinese names, phrases, terms, etc into google or altavista using your windows IME or by cutting and pasting from pages you've found already. It's amazing how much is out there.

Wow! Not only are the photos nice, but they include the form instructions that accompanied the same photos in Wu Gongzao's book. They're very elegantly written, some in verse (lines of seven), although they've run the lines together on the website to save space. Nice stuff!

I happened briefly to peruse this site, which was indeed quite interesting. In looking at the materials about Yang Chengfu¡¯s form, I came upon two things that surprised me. One was the phrase Òâº¬¶¥¾¢ (Yi4 han2 ding3 jin(g)4). This seems like: ¡°The mind contains energy pushing to the top.¡± If this is correct, does this not shed light on Yang Chengfu¡¯s interpretation of Ì“ì`í”„Å (i.e., the first of the Ten Essentials)? At a minimum, it would seem that ¡°ding jin(g)¡± is being viewed as a noun phrase.

The second surprise I had was the character ±Á in the phrase À¿È¸Î²£¬Æä·¨ÓÐËÄ£ºÔ»±Á¡¢ÞÛ¡¢¼·¡¢°´. Is this character common for peng2? I thought this was normally written with the hand radical rather than the silk radical? Any ideas to explain this choice?

The section on Yang Style has the form instructions from Yang Chengfu's Taijiquan Tiyong Quanshu Ì«¼«È­ówÓÃÈ«•ø. The phrase you mention, Òâº¬¶¥¾¢, is probably a verbal reference he made in his demonstration narrative. I translate it "The intent is on the energy at the crown of the head." As it happens, Zheng Manqing edited the earlier versions of these form instructions from Yang's 1931 book, Taijiquan shiyongfa. In the earlier book, one character was different in this particular phrase. In the earlier book, the phrase was, ÄÚº¬¶¥¾¢. In both cases, the phrase is preceded by the phrase, tou yi zhengzhi î^ÒËÕýÖ± (the head must be upwardly aligned).

As for the substitution of ±Á in the Grasp Sparrow's tail section, this was probably introduced by whoever typed up the web page entries. Peng ’òwith the hand radical is a rare character, and not all hanzi software programs contain it in their lexicons. Even when they do, the code may not be supported by the browser. Elsewhere on that site there are some collections of the taiji classics where they have entered the hand radical as a separate element, which isn't an ideal solution. In the original Yang books, of course, the ’ò character was used.

Yes, those pictures are pretty great, aren't they? That set of 62, I think, from 1936 or so, document the Wu style in a way similar to Yang Chengfu's later photos. Like Yang Chengfu's photos, they were later made into a set of drawings and supplemented with some drawings to show some of the transitions etc. and made into a book, 'Wu Style Taijiquan', by Xu Zhiyi, published in 1958. Here is the way the drawing of the 5th picture looks:

The text in the book is different from that shown on the website, more like the format of Fu Zhongwen's treatment of the Yang Style form.

I love the Wu Jianquan photos too. Even though the outward shape is different from the Yang form, the energy in those photos is just inspiring. There have been time when I’ve done my form after spending some time looking at the classic Wu Jianquan photos, and it seems like the images had a subtle effect on the way I did my form. The internal logic seems to translate quite well.

Of course, the same can be said of studying the photos of other masters—Yang Chengfu, Yang Zhenduo, Sun Lutang, et al. One can learn a great deal by emulating the energy (for lack of a better word) in these photos.

*Here’s a quick note for those curious about reading Chinese characters on the web. If your browser doesn’t already have Chinese fonts, you can download a Chinese font pack for Internet Explorer on the Microsoft website. Once they’re loaded, you can chose “Encoding” under the “View” menu, then either “Chinese Traditional,” or “Chinese Simplified.” Depending on your browser, these may be named “Big 5” (coding for Traditional fonts) or “GB” (coded for simplified). Some browsers automatically detect the codes and switch the view to enable them. If not enabled, the Chinese characters appear as random code.

Jerry,If you need someone to proof read that translation along the way.....Since I can't read a word of chinese, I would be no good along those lines.I would, very much, like to see it when you're done though.

And I've heard of the Zhu book, but have no skill in reading chinese, of course, so could see no real reason to buy it.As Louis says, just looking at the pictures can help though.